Just Do Nothing

[variousqueerthings]

we need more dials and knobs and levers again. this world is lacking in dials and knobs and levers. it's one of our biggest issues.

[pointnclick]

"No one wants to work anymore." Damn right brother. If I could sit in a beautiful field for 40 hours every week of my singular precious life I would

[abcdefuk-off]

Spoiler Alert: no one ever wanted to fucking work. But they did it because they used to get enough out of it - because working would get them a car and a house and a vacation. All working does anymore is get you barely enough to throw into the pit of despair known as rent.

[yms1]

"There's millions of Tumblr users" to you. To me There's only about 12 and we all reblog the same five posts from each other

[seananmcguire]

Occasionally someone will bring a new post into the ecosystem, and those days are VERY exciting. ENRICHMENT!

[roycohns]

starting a collection. pierre talking to natasha in war and peace

[roycohns]

additions

[certifiedgirlthing]

I've asked my friends "What's it like in [NEXT YEAR]?", as I'm in a later timezone than them.

[sensiblereblogifposts]

Reblog if you want to know what it is like in [next year]

[inkskinned]

the problem is that being single is seen as the consolidation prize, and not the natural neutral state of being-a-person. at the end of the movie or the book or the poetry, there is a person waiting for you at the altar, and they love you. if the play is a comedy, everyone gets married. the metaphor is about how you are not-whole. the metaphor is about how everyone is going to be happily-ever-after. the metaphor is that romantic love is the most important resource on the planet, not just all-love. all-love is not a thing, that is a disappointment. the treasure is not the friends we made along the way. the treasure is the girl you landed.

the metaphor is that you cannot be alone, that means you are broken. are you getting over someone? that is acceptable, you can be getting over someone, but not for long. you must be single because you would rather not be single. you must be single and looking to not-be-single. you must want to date, eventually.

friendship and community are never seen as being equal-to or even-better than romantic connection. that person is your one! you need to find them. you need to hunt through the sand particles until you can shift out some kind of gem. this is regardless to your own experience of the beach and the sun. you need to be somewhere with someone.

if you are taking this time alone to heal, that is so sad. everyone gives you this little pitying look. the understanding is that you are not actually happier than you were before you were single. it is seen as a sort of pity - oh, you are choosing yourself, making yourself the priority? - that isn't quite right. you must mean that you are making yourself ready for the right person. you are just laying the bed better this time. open up your heart. you'll find them, we promise!

what do you mean you're really-truly genuinely-very happy? you are probably misremembering what it was like to be in a relationship. and besides, once you meet your person, that time will look grey and bland and wasted. your person is the only way for you to see in color. so what if you have taken this time - for the first time in your entire life - to actually-for-real do the fucking work. you can be proud of yourself, sure. but the way we need to know that you got better is that you get a partner. you're healed enough for the next bad part!

people don't choose to be single, they just say they're choosing to be single - they actually mean "nobody wants to date me." it doesn't matter how many people you have gently rejected or how many times you've talked it over carefully in therapy. what matters is that you are single, and by all accounts - that means you are something worth our pity. your successes and life all seem pale in the sunlight. sure, you have done amazing things and finally found your way in life. what matters is that there wasn't a person in the room with you while you did it.

you want to tell them - that's the whole thing. i didn't know how to be alone in the room. i didn't know how to handle the silence. every moment was so sharp, and i kept choosing the wrong way to close the door. i have spent my entire life in the empty well, living in the ricochet of someone else's cruelty. for once i have built myself a ladder. for once everything i taste is all mine, every bite of sunshine and laughter. i have learned how to sleep out in the open with my memories. recently, they have started to purr.

your father rolls his eyes. listen. this isn't about you. i just want a grandchild in my future.

[favroitecrime]

For the last time :)

It is not a neutral “conflict”. Palestinians don’t have:

an army

police officers littered around the streets fighting off attacking settlers

$3.8B funding from the US

bomb shelters

homes (hello they’re being evicted and bombed?)

immediate access to medical care (settlers are blocking ambulances and throwing grenades)

citizen acknowledgement from the government that supposedly wants to help them

means of defending themselves

the right to properly mourn (a funeral was recently attacked by settlers)

justice

Anyone who chooses to claim neutrality is choosing to claim the side of genocide. Neutral = complicit. The number of Palestinian deaths remains staggering and I promise, the occupying state’s numbers are nothing compared to it. Thousands more deaths and fatalities have occurred to the Palestinian people. When the death toll defers by roughly 9,000, I think it’s safe to say that the situation isn’t neutral.*

I repeat, if you are neutral, you side with genocide.

*x

As a bonus:

[ripe]

AGAIN. THIS IS FROM 2021. THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS DID NOT BEGIN ON OCTOBER 7. THIS WAS ALWAYS THE GOAL

[micdotcom]

[997]

reading this was more cathartic than expected

[slowtides]

when sandra cisneros said "For a long time after, I’d just burst into tears if anyone even touched me. Sometimes it’s like that when somebody touches you and you haven’t been touched in a long time." and when jamaica kincaid said "I felt very sad so I sat down. I felt so sad that I rested my head on my own knees and smoothed my own head. I felt so sad I couldn’t imagine feeling any other way again." and when sonia sanchez said "And I cried. For myself. For this woman talkin’ about love. For all the women who have ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins."

[warningsine]

[homunculus-argument]

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

[therainstheyaredropping]

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.

[hergan416]

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

[foxsoulcourt]

"Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken."

[alisonzai]

[mysharona1987]

[graypyre]

I just sent this to my husband and his response was “you can’t put a price on that” uh, yeah you can, they just did. 🙄

[lemonsharks]

The ’70s Feminist Manifesto That’s Still a Must-Read Today

Judy Brady Syfers wrote ‘I Want a Wife’ in 1971. It holds up.

[elljayvee]

My mother used to mutter “I want a WIFE” angrily from time to time.

Later, after my parents split up and my mom’s bff’s spouse died, mom’s bff moved in. Mom would come home from work and the house would be clean! Dinner would be ready! Laundry done! Homework checked!

She called me up, delighted, a few weeks into it. “I was right! I DID want a wife!”

[deputychairman]

i remember the blissful 14 months when me and my friend shared a nanny, and coming back into the living room to find she had spontaneously tidied up the extreme chaos. That must be what it’s like, being a man, that you can just walk away from some mess to get ready for work, and when you come back somebody else has dealt with it without any physical or mental effort from you. 

[cumaeansibyl]

I think about this essay all the time

[ierotits]

i love when tumblr literally comes up with a site sweeping meme overnight. the original cake baking poll was posted just over a day ago, and now every single new poll has vanilla extract in it

[our-lady-of-venom]

𝓘 𝓵𝓸𝓿𝓮 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓲𝓷 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓼𝓪𝓶𝓮 𝔀𝓪𝔂 𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓮’𝓼 𝓪 𝓬𝓱𝓪𝓹𝓮𝓵 𝓲𝓷 𝓪 𝓱𝓸𝓼𝓹𝓲𝓽𝓪𝓵

the circus, olivia levez // hum hallelujah, fall out boy // the anthropocene reviewed, john green // @silk-dyke // cocaine jesus, rainbow kitten suprise // the kids aren't alright, fall out boy // hozier on twitter (2018) // the return, dean gioia // @constellatedlove // i loved my friend, langston hughes

[paradoxarchive]

i am too in love with life, i don't want to die (i cannot fathom the absence of living)

arthoesunshine | sunlightafterdark | joseph cambell | mary oliver | amy krouse rosenthal | joseph brodsky | unknown | gregory orr | colette, tr by matthew ward | anaïs nin

[luxurybrownbarbie]

I know this will bother unhealed adults, but the real world, more often than not, does give you second chances and do overs. Very rarely are things set in stone. And people, especially young people, deserve to know that. Because lording the idea that they can never mess up, even once, does a lot more damage than good.